Greater New Orleans

Immigrants: The Times-Picayune covers 175 years of history

Out at the western end of the city, near Lake Pontchartrain, is an unlikely reminder of an important demographic factor in the city’s development. It’s a wide, grassy neutral ground between northbound West End Boulevard and southbound Pontchartrain Boulevard.

175 years of history

Underneath it is the New Basin Canal, which opened in 1838 and ran from the lake to the interior of the city. Tens of thousands of Irish and German immigrants dug the channel by hand, and many died of mosquito-borne illnesses in the process.

A monument with a Celtic cross now adorns part of that wide swath of green space where the canal was before it was filled in. The monument honors the Irish workers who died there, part of an ethnic group that has a long history in New Orleans.

What is now considered the Irish Channel was a rowdy district along the Mississippi River in what used to be the city of Lafayette, a small municipality later absorbed into New Orleans. Many Irish immigrants could find work on the riverfront as well as at the slaughterhouses, cotton presses and sugar refineries that were there, and they lived nearby.

A similar process was under way downriver. German and Irish immigrants also settled in the Faubourg Marigny and Bywater areas, drawn by the jobs at the wharves and factories along the river there.

After the Civil War, the Irish found a new economic rival in the waves of Italian immigrants who headed into the city and competed for work. With both the Irish and Italians on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, they became intense, often violent, competitors.

That animosity flared up in the murder of Police Chief David Hennessey, who was Irish, in 1891. After nine Italians accused of the murder were acquitted or granted mistrials, a mob lynched 11 Italians, including some who were never charged in the case.

But despite the hardships they faced, the Irish became an important part of the city’s government, and names like Hickey, Shea, Comiskey, Fitzmorris and Burke, to name just a few, have dotted its political landscape over the years.